Now you can play games at lower quality and higher latency than ever before, and pay Google for the privilege of renting them! Plus, Google can control what games you play! Innovation!

AFAIK, there is a big difference in the backend. Something like the Playstation 'cloud gaming' gave you remote access to a playstation console. Others gave you access to a VM running the game. I think Microsoft was talking about giving you access to your own XBox running at home?

The games were not re-engineered / ported specifically to run 'in the cloud' as Stadia is attempting. There are some interesting things that could allow, if a developer ever decides to utilize it.

My mental model is that Stadia is just like owning a PS/Xbox, but the hardware is in Google's datacentres.

You pay the one-off cost to buy the console, you then maybe pay for the Pro subscription, but you have to buy your games and those games are locked to that platform - just like with PS/Xbox.

All the other stuff about having games that deliver something unseen before because of "the cloud" are mostly promises and theoretical features at this stage, so I wouldn't bank too much on that.

I think I can help answer your question, but just watching the keynote will be best. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM. The tl;dr of the whole keynote is what's different about Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. Outside of Amazon and Microsoft I don't know of another company that will be able to match the latency and computation requirements to make this all work as marketed. What really stood out to me from their keynote this year was the number of edge nodes that Google has on top of their datacenter infrastructure. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360

> What is different with Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure.

That's not innovation, it's just having a bigger stick than the other guy.

Yes,we know, nothing remotely similar to anything else is innovation. Airplanes are just bicycles with bolted on wings.

Okay, but that's hardly what most would consider innovative. Applying their large scale is more of an evolution of or improvement to the established cloud gaming idea.

That's what the word "innovation" means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation

All that compute and network power and yet GeForceNow performs better for me than Stadia.

I'm just one datapoint, I know, but that's also just a keynote.

Google Suggest is low latency, and required a huge effort, driven from the top.

Cloud gaming needs even lower latency. I don't think it's possible, but if google is doing the serious datacenter work, it must be a testbed for something else, because gaming isn't worth it anyway.

"gaming isn't worth it anyway"

> By 2018, the United States video game industry had matched that of the Unites States film industry on basis of revenue, with both industries having made around US$43 billion that year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry

Google's revenue in 2018 was $137B... but you're right, a slice of $43B may be worth it to them.